no more
by redremembrance
Summary: alternative ending to season 4


_I thought our story was epic, you know, you and me_.

The words are just an echo in her head now. They were kids, then, all chemistry and chaos. He grew up before she did, she realizes that now. Should have realized that when he started going to therapy.

And that night she pushed him, that night she demanded he go backwards because she had stayed the same and it scared her, that he'd grown and she hadn't. It scared her, because what if he outgrew her?

She'd let her fear push her, let it push him, let it break them both.

There are a lot of things she'd like to take back, but that night more than most.

He'd loved her anyway, that was the miracle of it. Veronica spent her days watching married couples shred each other, tear each other apart, but maybe there was more to it than that. Maybe breaking was a choice, sometimes.

Maybe she could do better.

She shoves another dress into her bag, thinks about telling him exactly how she wants him to rip it off her.

She'd been drawn to his violence, first, she realizes. Because there was a part of herself, a broken, toxic thing inside her that was violent too.

But he saw it first. He saw it and he learned to do better, because he loved her.

He loved her.

"Logan," she calls, and he pauses at the door, grinning back at her over his shoulder.

"I gotta move the car," he calls back.

"Do you remember when you called us epic?"

The smile on his face softens. "I remember that I got wasted that night," he says. "That I said a lot of things I meant, but I didn't remember saying them the next day. And that when I told you that, you were _so_ pissed. It's the first time…the first time I thought, _hey, maybe this drinking thing is a bit much_."

"You said we were epic," she tells him. "Years and continents. Ruined lives and bloodshed."

Something serious, shadowed crosses his face, and he takes a step back inside towards her.

"Yea," he says. "Sounds like some dramatic shit I'd say."

"It's true though, isn't it?" she looks up at him, and she's grinning, but she needs to say it, to tell him that all that broken shit inside her that she sweeps away and doesn't look at? She's ready to look at it. She is.

"Maybe," he says gently, and then he crosses the space between them. Takes her hand in his. "It has been, hasn't it? Years between us, back and forth. It took so long for me to get my shit together. To believe that a happy life was something I could hope for. Something I could ever deserve."

"Me, too," she whispers, and he pulls her in closer.

She likes how she fits here, her head tucked in against his shoulder. She realizes now that he was her first safe space in a long time.

"I'm sure between the two of us, we've ruined our fair share of lives." Logan's voice twists into sarcasm, and he pulls back and kisses her on the forehead. "Most recently, you ruined a bomber's life."

She grins up at him. "All in a day's work."

"Continents, too," he adds thoughtfully. "I've crossed a few."

"I know you said most recently"—

"Nope," he cuts her off with a grin. "Still not getting that out of me."

"And bloodshed," she finishes. "That was the last one."

He looks at her with something like sadness in his eyes. "We've seen our fair share, haven't we?"

"Didn't you," she begins, and her voice fractures because how does she say this? This ugly thought that's always been in her head, that she's always been afraid to say? But maybe it's time. Maybe it's time to let those ugly things out, say them so she can make them smaller. "Didn't you ever think maybe it's how we'd go? I always thought…I always thought I'd live big and die big, you know? Mess around with murderers and then one day…one day soon, I'd pay for it?"

He shakes his head. "No," he says firmly. "No. We've seen the dark, a lot of it. Maybe too much of it to ever be whole. But there is no part of you that deserves this. I won't let you tell yourself that."

"Good," she says. "Because it's not like I _really_ thought that. That I deserved it or anything. Anyway, you should go move the car and I should go shower and we really should just"—

"Veronica."

_Jesus_, it's unfair the way she feels when he says her name like that.

He pulls her back to him. Brushes a strand of hair out of her face. "Thank you for telling me," he says tentatively. "How you felt."

It's new for them, this thing they do. Feelings. Healthy communication. More respect than rivalry these days, and she likes it, she _does_, but she's still so damn bad at it. He's better than she is at it, and that stings, too, even though it shouldn't.

"Yea," she whispers. "Okay, hero. Go move that car."

The word jars something loose.

"_Hero_," she whispers again, and then she shakes her head. There's something, something deep in her gut, the intuition her dad always told her to listen to.

"I was thinking," Logan says thoughtfully, and now he cups her face with his hands and every other thought flees. "What if we weren't?"

"Weren't what?" she's hanging on his words now, goddamn him.

"Weren't epic," he says. "What if we deserve something better? What if we deserve to be done with bloodshed and lives ruined? What if we deserve better than continents between us? What if the only years we deserve are the ones we get to spend together?"

"Sounds like some dramatic bullshit you'd say," she repeats his words back to him with a smile on her face, but her throat catches. "I'm in."

And now she's kissing him, and everything melts away, and that's when the explosion rocks their whole apartment.

/

He pulls her down to the ground, his body shielding hers, instinct and training and love covering her, keeping her safe.

He takes shrapnel to the back, and she has a bump on her head.

And they're okay.

Later he tells her that if they hadn't stayed an extra few minutes to talk about their feelings, he would have been in that car when the bomb went off.

She tells him to shut up, and he tells her that she has to save the _shut ups_ at least until all the shrapnel has been picked out of his back.

That night, they're in bed at some shitty motel along the coast, because the paramedic took so damn long to pull the shrapnel out and because giving their statement to the police _also_ took too damn long and now they're both wrong about arrival time at their destination.

Logan props himself up on his elbow and looks down at her.

"You okay?" she asks, because she can't believe he's not in pain. And just because he's had worse, just because he's been bleeding his whole life, doesn't mean she'll let him get by with thinking this pain now isn't valid.

"No," he says, and the honesty looks good on him. His eyes are soft, and she isn't much of a romantic but she could stare at them forever. He's always been like that, mesmerizing as an open flame, and she's the cussing moth. "It hurts. But I will be."

She remembers what he said that day when she pushed him too hard, told him she missed the Old Logan, when he said he was trying to be supportive. She tries it out, because hey, maybe he was right. Maybe this _healthy adult relationship_ thing _was_ possible, after all. "What can I do?" she asks, and she hates that her voice sounds hesitant when she's pretended to be confident for so damn long, but she can see in his eyes that he's not holding it against her. "To help?"

He smiles, and it's this flash of real happiness that she sees that makes something in her own chest grow, expand. "Be here with me," he says. "Tomorrow, get on an airplane somewhere warm and quiet. That's all that I want."

Maybe it's all that he ever wanted, this boy with the scars and the determination to be more than them. Maybe it's all she's wanted in a long time, too. A taste of freedom, a taste of peace. A different kind of courage, one where she has to face the things she's hidden from.

"We had a shit start to our new beginning," she says. "Surviving a car bomb was kind of a letdown after we decided not to do any more bloodshed."

He laughs and leans down to kiss her. "Shit is always going to be a bit explosive with us," he tells her. "Doesn't mean we're failing at the rest of it."

"And who the fuck wants the kind of relationship someone writes songs about anyway?" she moves closer to him, hands trailing down his side.

And then it's just them, just Logan and Veronica, and nothing went as planned, because nothing ever did, but they're here, they're together, their hands on each other and their lips on each others' and she's so _damn_ grateful that she got to be a wife for more than just a few hours.

They're not what they were, they're not the old Logan and Veronica, but they're more than that, better. Not quite healed, but not as broken, not anymore. They came from so much pain, the two of them, but they're still here, murderers and monsters be damned, and that—

That is a different kind of epic.


End file.
